It has become conventional practice, in manufacturing rolled sheet products, to wind the product onto coiling mandrels after any one of a variety of processing steps such as cold rolling, temper rolling, annealing or slitting into smaller strands. In order to insure that the product is wound evenly onto the mandrel, several considerations must be made with respect to the alignment of the product with the manufacturing line. For example, the moving sheet product must be controlled to run evenly along the centerline of the rolling mill and, at the coiling end of the line, the product must approach the coiling mandrel at a proper angle to insure even winding of the coils. The establishment and maintenance of this mill alignment criteria is critical to prevent lap to lap variations of the finished coiled product which can result in product damage from either the coiling equipment or collisions with other coils. Additionally, when unevenly wound coils are placed on their ends for either storage or shipping, damage to the coil ends is likely to occur.
It is therefore necessary for the operators of a sheet rolling mill to maintain proper adjustment and alignment of the sheet product between the processing unit and the coiler. Heretofore an operator was not expected to spend much time on precise calculations and measurements to produce evenly wound coils. More than likely operators would resort to their experience in determining the quality of the coil windings and would adjust the mill alignment accordingly. Such instinctive setup methods may work reasonably well for experienced operators but they provide little or no guidance for new inexperienced operators.